Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, was not very happy with Paul Rosenberg and Frederick Clarkson’s recent Salon article on Religious Freedom Day. He writes:
When Americans celebrate Religious Freedom Day tomorrow, not everyone will be happy about it. Liberals are already blasting the tradition that honors the 1786 signing of one of the most influential documents in American history: the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Now, more than 230 years into the tradition that sparked a revolution, the Left is ready to recast history.
In Salon, hardly the bastion of conservative thought, Paul Rosenberg tries to persuade readers that freedom is the oppression, insisting that when Christians talk about religious liberty, it’s really just code for “theocratic supremacism of their own religious beliefs inscribed in government.” Taking aim at FRC in particular, Rosenberg points to Frederick Clarkson, who insists that our Church Ministries team has been “empowered to advance a dangerous suite of theocratic and persecutory policies” (while producing absolutely zero evidence to the effect). Instead, he talks suspiciously about our Culture Impact Teams (CITs), our network of on-the-ground activists in churches across America. Operating under the authority of the church’s leadership, CITs serve as the command center for a church’s efforts to engage the culture.
Then he starts to play fast and loose with the Constitution. He quotes Rosenberg: “I think if we got serious about taking Jefferson and Madison’s foundational ideas of religious equality under the law into the 21stcentury, Christian nationalism would crumble.” And then Perkins adds: “Our own Constitution closes with the words, ‘In the year of our Lord, 1787.’ That’s a reference to Jesus! The signers not only embraced Christianity, they anchored our most important document in it.”
OK. I have written about this before. First, the Constitution says “year of our Lord.” It does not say anything about Jesus. Second, this phrase hardly serves as an “anchor” of the Constitution. Third, “In the year of our Lord” was a standard eighteenth-century way of referencing the date. We need to be careful about giving it too much theological meeting. Fourth, it is worth noting that an appeal to God does tell us something about the eighteenth-century world that the founders inhabited. We don’t sign documents like this today. Fifth, because the phrase “In the year of our Lord” is boilerplate, it was probably not added until after the delegates had left Philadelphia. Sixth, the minutes of the Constitutional Convention reveal that there was no discussion about the phrase “In the year of our Lord.” In other words, NO ONE said anything like: “Let’s end the document with the phrase ‘In the year of our Lord’ because it will send a message to everyone that we are creating a Christian nation.”
Perkins is correct when he says that Jefferson included the writing of the Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom on his tombstone. Jefferson was a champion of religious freedom. He believed that everyone had the right to worship God freely without government interference. Jefferson did not comment on whether or not it was appropriate to have a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse or a prayer before a football game. It is very difficult to appeal to his writings (or the writings of James Madison) to argue for or against such things.
Perkins writes: “Before President Trump, Jefferson would barely recognize his country.” Really? Jefferson lived in a different era, but he would certainly be able to spot Christian nationalists like Perkins. He did battle against them in his own day (Christian Federalists) and would probably do battle with them today. Jefferson regularly slammed pious New Englanders and their Christian political establishments. He worried that they were trying to create a Christian nation, not a nation informed by religious liberty.
I have mixed feelings about this whole religious liberty debate:
- When Christian Right evangelicals talk about religious liberty they use this idea in a negative way–to protect themselves and their views. In other words, they are rarely interested in articulating a positive view of religious liberty that defends the right of all people to worship freely.
- There are real religious liberty issues at stake in our country right now. Will Christian institutions who uphold traditional views of marriage, for example, remain in a position to receive government funds or maintain a tax-exempt status? I wrote about this yesterday.
On the one hand, people like Rosenberg and Clarkson need to offer a vision of religious liberty that protects the rights of churches, Christian schools, and other Christian institutions to practice their faith in the way they see fit, even in areas of sexual politics. Frankly, I think Hillary Clinton’s failure to defend religious liberty in this way may have, among other things, cost her the election in 2016.
On the other hand, Christian Right activists like Perkins need to stop manipulating history. When it comes to Jefferson, Perkins could probably learn a great deal from what David Barton went through when he published The Jefferson Lies. In the end, if Perkins believes in liberty then he cannot, at the same time, defend the idea that the government should privilege one form of religious belief over another.
The problems with her review begin in the first sentence, where she mocks me for writing that Monticello is “literally above the clouds.” Perhaps she does not know that it was Jefferson himself who made that observation, in one of his most famous letters: “And our own dear Monticello . . . How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!”
Lewis taunts me for writing, “In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson, and adds, smirking, “Um, I think we have that one figured out.” Actually, we don’t have it figured out. Jefferson’s grandson wrote that not just Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman also had children who clearly resembled Jefferson. Who was that other woman? Who were her children? Who was the father? I’ve never seen an explanation; if Lewis has seen one I will happily stand corrected.
Among the “howlers” Lewis claims to have found is my statement that just after the American Revolution “Virginia came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery,” and she claims I quoted “some pages in a recent book that say nothing of the sort.” In fact I first quote from George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights the statement that “all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity”; I go on to quote Eva Sheppard Wolf’s analysis: “Several Revolutionary-era Virginia laws seemed to signal a shift toward anti-slavery policies that could have led to universal emancipation.” (In a passage I didn’t quote in my book, Wolf further writes that some historians “see several indications that it was possible to end = American slavery in the late eighteenth century.”) I make it clear that this surge of liberal sentiment was short-lived–but it should be noted that Virginia passed a very liberal manumission law in 1782, by which Jefferson could have freed slaves. So there is no “howler.”
And now we come to Lewis’s incoherent effort to refute the irrefutable — my verbatim quotation of Jefferson’s 1792 calculation that his enslaved population grew at the rate of 4% a year, which yielded a profit for Monticello. She tries to discredit this by quoting a letter he wrote a year later that does not support her argument at all. Lewis is trying to lead us into the weeds. Jefferson said what he said. Lewis does not mention Jefferson’s unnerving advice to a neighbor, which I quote in the book, to invest in Negroes because they “bring a silent profit of from 5 to 10 per cent in this country by the increase in their value.” Did Jefferson not write that? Or did he write it but
not mean it?
I am pleased that she quotes Jefferson proclaiming, “there is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.” He said that at least four times, but my point has been to show that nonetheless, he sacrificed nothing to end slavery, even when Kosciuszko left him a bequest of some $20,000 to enable Jefferson to free his slaves. Lewis does not mention that uncomfortable story.
Lewis’s loudest condemnation of my book is that there is nothing new in it, that she and others have long known all this. But if they knew all this, why didn’t they tell us that Jefferson recommended investing in black people as a financial strategy, or that “the small ones” were whipped to get them to work in his nail factory? Perhaps they feel as a visitor to Monticello did: “An awe and veneration was felt for Mr. Jefferson among his neighbors which . . . rendered it shameful to even talk about his name in such a connexion.” Better that the people not know these things, I guess.
Henry Wiencek